Also welcome were the enhanced widget capabilities in "Jelly Bean." "One really subtle thing that I really appreciated was the ability to move widgets to the different home screens" and have them resize themselves, says Blake Cicheskie, a computer engineering student at the University of Florida. "I had an [Android] 'Ice Cream Sandwich' tablet, where that became an issue sometimes when I wanted to add widgets or delete widgets."

Meanwhile, Cicheskie says the Project Butter visual performance improvements -- which ensure that all apps and processes refresh the screen at the same intervals -- "are really going to shine," he says. "It's really going to make Android much more smoother." Activision's Drulea also praises the visual improvements: "The most impressive things to me were probably the visual enhancements -- the frame rate and the responsiveness. ... That's pretty cool."

Another student, Apoorva Bansal of the University of Michigan, cites the new cards capabilities in search for presenting related information in one place. "That was definitely an improvement on the UI."